The chief minister has used the instruments of governance against dissenters and minorities.
The death of a 19-year-old Dalit girl in the Hathras district of western Uttar Pradesh – after she was gang-raped by four Thakur men, strangled, her spine, limbs paralysed – followed by the 3-am cremation of her body by the police, is only the latest reminder of how unsafe the state has become for its most disadvantaged citizens. Although UP was fifth by crime rate against Dalits in 2019, registered crimes against Dalits – many are not recorded – in UP rose 47% over four years to 2018, according to the latest available data from the National Crime Records Bureau (Following UP, crimes against Dalits rose 26% in Gujarat,15% in Haryana,14% in Madhya Pradesh and 11% in Maharashtra – states governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party over these years, which may be a coincidence). In 2019, India’s most populous state, with about 16% of the country’s population, also accounted for more than 25% of crimes against women and girls and gang rapes, according to the NCRB. At least three more rapes were reported the day after the death of the Hathras teen, who the police claim was not raped. The inability to control crime in UP runs alongside a clampdown by its chief minister Yogi Adityanath on cow-slaughter and the small-scale beef trade – run largely by Muslims and Dalits – his misuse of preventive-detention and other laws against dissenters, the encouragement of extra-judicial killings, a campaign against so-called “love jihad” of Muslim men marrying Hindu women and indifference to court orders. From his first days in office, the chief minister has not hesitated to use the instruments of governance to create and consolidate a state that draws on the concerns of vigilante groups and puts Hindus, especially the advantaged “upper” castes, first and uses the law and the police to target, punish, defame, imprison and in some cases even kill Muslims and dissenters, as we chronicle. In 2017, after the BJP and its allies won 325 seats out of 403 in the state assembly elections, Adityanath was hand-picked by the national BJP leadership – and presumably its ideological leader the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – to lead UP. This choice marked a significant watershed moment in the advance of the BJP in the Indian republic, as it signalled an endorsement of a model of governance that openly and unapologetically targeted Muslim citizens and political dissidents as public enemies. Born in 1972 in a Thakur family in a village in the mountainous district of Pauri Garhwal in what is now Uttarakhand, Ajay Mohan Bisht was drawn as a young man to the Ram Janmbhoomi movement to demolish the Babri mosque at Ayodhya and build a Ram temple. He renounced his family at the age of 21 after graduating in mathematics, to become a disciple of Mahant Avaidyanath, chief priest of the Gorakhnath Math. Mahant Avaidyanath was elected to Parliament on a Hindu Mahasabha ticket. The earlier mahant (chief priest) of this temple, Digvijaynath, the first in independent India, was arrested in connection with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and went on to become in 1967 an MP on a Hindu Mahasabha ticket. Bisht assumed the name Yogi Adityanath and was anointed by Avaidyanath as his successor. He became the chief priest of the Gorakhnath Math after the death of Mahant Avaidyanath in 2014. At 26, Adityanath was elected MP on a BJP ticket in 1998 from the Gorakhpur constituency, and was re-elected for five successive terms. When Adityanath first became an MP, he pointedly announced he was not looking for Muslim votes. Throughout his political career, Adityanath has been vocal about that anti-Muslim bias. “If they kill one Hindu, then we will kill 100 Muslims,” Adityanath declared in 2007. Among his notable contributions to Hindutva politics was to raise a Hindu militia called the Hindu Yuva Vahini in 2002. Scholars Chaturvedi, Pandey and Gellner observed that when Adityanath established the Hindu Yuva Vahini, it mainly attracted upper-caste, unemployed youth who did not find a space in the Samajwadi Party or the Bahujan Samaj Party, the two parties that had established their dominance in UP politics by then, claiming to represent the interests of disadvantaged castes. In their fact-finding report on riots in the eastern UP town of Mau in 2005, Vibhuti Narain Rai, Rooprekha Verma and Nasiruddin Haider Khan spoke presciently of the Hindu Yuva Vahini, comprising “mostly unemployed youth, small level criminals and the youth struggling for identity”, fighting Muslims with “arson, destruction of property and beating”. The Hindu Yuva Vahini provided much-needed muscle power to Adityanath and helped consolidate his political power in Gorakhpur and nearby districts. The slogan popularised by them was, “Gorakhpur mein rehna hai toh Yogi kehna hai” (if you wish to stay in Gorakhpur, you must chant the Yogi’s name). In 2007, his remarks inflamed a communal conflagration, after a Hindu youth was killed in skirmishes sparked by disruptions to a Muharram procession.
